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HP 1012 laserjet problems

After installing Mandrake Linux version 10.1 on a HP laptop, my
HP 1012 laserjet printer worked fine for a few days. Then for
some reason, it began printing the following error message
(and nothing else) on each page whenever I tried to print
something:

Thanks for the reference explaining the problem. As a result, I think I understand a little bit more about what the problem is,
but the question remains:

How do I correct the problem?

Do I need to download the latest HPIJS driver and re-install it, or do I just
need to change/ add a few lines of code to some file (i.e., the
appropriate PPD file) somewhere?

Does the latest HPIJS driver contain Carl Michal's "fix" ? If not, how
do I implement this fix to get my printer working?

By the way, I did download the latest HPIJS files and tried to
install them according to the procedure I found, but I got
an error message something like "unsupported ljpeg". I then tried to use
the Mandrake utility to install what I thought were the missing
libraries, but I still can't get the ./configure command to run
properly.

This problem is all over the net with Linux and Windows so certainly the fix must be included in later versions of the driver. Since you have an older version of Mandrake, you are on the right track by upgrading the version so I looked for a newer .rpm of the HPIJS. Look on this page for hplip-hpijs-0.9.4-6mdk.i586 about halfway down the page. Note it's for Mandriva 2006 but it very well may install without problems. When I was using Mandrake and Redhat, I'd occaisionally have luck installing packages from later versions of my distro if the particular package I needed wasn't available for my version. You'll likely get error messages if there is a problem. Of course, I wouldn't try to install it if the version itself is older than the one you already have. If this fails, search for a later version of the driver as an .RPM for Mandrake 10.1. rpmfind.net is a good place to look. Since Mandriva is an RPM based distro there's likely to be the right RPM out there somewhere, and you'll likely have less problems installing it than trying to compile from source. If all this fails, I might be able to help you build the package from source. Let me know...

I may just try to forget about Mandrake Linux 10.1 and try to
install Mandriva Linux 2005 instead. Perhaps that will get the
HP 1012 printer to work correctly??

I'm not going to try to install Mandriva 2006 since I have heard
that it has lots of bugs in it. Do you agree with this?

Against what many believe, I think it is prudent to stay a version or two behind on "cutting edge" distros such as Mandrake and Fedora for stability reasons. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with your reasoning.